20 Years After ‘DIG!’ Revitalized rOCK docs, Ondi & David Timoner Add More Chaos & Context To A Sundance Classic - The Deadline Q&A
Dig!, a documentary about two bands – The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols – is a musical trainwreck, equal parts romantic comedy and horror film that follows the highs and lows of being a musician, in the studio, on the road and in their own heads.

The film, which launched at Sundance in 2004 and is returning to the festival this year with an extended cut, is a favorite among the musical class. I’ve sat in countless tour vans and crappy motels where it’s watched, quoted and dissected by kids with a dream and a drumkit.

Ondi Timoner Talks About Her Digital Future Doc ‘The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution’ Ahead Of Netflix Debut; Watch Trailer Here

EXCLUSIVE: Timing is everything to documentary veteran Ondi Timoner, and the decision to launch her latest film in January, on New Year’s Day, is no coincidence. Premiered at SXSW in March, The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution is a fast and furious look at the post-Trump, post-Covid world we live in and the virtual spaces that have usurped the traditional norms of interaction and communication.

We have your first look at the film in the trailer above.

The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution deals with a lot of seemingly random issues and pulls them neatly together, notably the rise of the citizen stockbrokers, whose interventions caused havoc on Wall Street when they came to the aid of ailing video game store GameStop after it went public in 2021. This, and Donald Trump’s impromptu party at the Capitol the same year, set her thinking.

Rock’n’roll Is Petty as Hell in This Music Documentary — and It’s Riveting

Ondi Timoner’s 2004 documentary Dig! is a masterful blend of everything there is to love about rock music. There is the superb songwriting and guitar playing of both The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols, two '90s bands that beautifully blended garage rock and psychedelics to create a unique sound. There’s the vain, petty, and even childish behavior of some of the band members, who obviously heard tales of rocker antics and sought to imitate them. There’s the fierce competitiveness and ferocious drive for success that many '90s bands pretended not to have, lest they seem too interested in commercialism. And finally, there is the frenemy relationship at the heart of the film between the two bands’ frontmen, which veers almost into reality TV territory. As we revisit this remarkably unique rock doc, we’ll see why its embrace of everything both wonderful and terrible about rock’n’roll makes it one of the all-time great music movies.

LAST FLIGHT HOME: EMMY NOMINATION

LAST FLIGHT HOME has received an Emmy nomination in the Documentary category of Exceptional Merit.

Ondi Timoner documents her father’s intentional final days in “Last Flight Home”

Speaking over lunch near her home last month, Timoner says that the documentary footage stemmed from “this desperate feeling that I needed to capture my father, but it wasn’t intended for public consumption.”

As the extended family gathered in her parents’ Pasadena home, Timoner set up cameras and kept them running. “I just document everything all the time,” she says. “My family, therefore, is very used to being documented by me, so they didn’t think the multi-camera setup was really anything.”

She also spoke to a therapist “to see if I was trying to hide from something or mediate my relationship to his dying, and she actually, to my surprise, said: ‘If you feel like you need to film, you should film.’”

What transpires over the course of two weeks is a series of heartfelt conversations, goodbyes over video calls, secret-sharing and tears. We learn the story of Eli’s success as the owner of a Florida airline company and then of his financial collapse after a stroke in his early 50s left him partially paralyzed.

Guest Column: ‘last flight home’ director on becoming an “death with Dignity” activist after father’s final moments

Everyone who loved my father understood his reasons to be done with this life on earth. He had been paralyzed for 40 years because of a stroke resulting from his neck being manipulated in a massage when he was only 53 years old. By 2021, he was 92 — weak, frail, battling terminal chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and falling a lot. He was tired of the fight. He would do anything for us, so how could we deny him his wish?

We found there was a law in California that would allow our father to take his own life with the help of medication after a 15-day waiting period, so we brought him home from the hospital to die on his own terms.

HER FATHEr exercised his right to die.

She filmed his final days.

On a live interview on CNN’s Amanpour & Company, filmmaker Ondi Timoner talks to Bianna Golodryga about turning the lens on her terminally ill father in "The Last Flight Home" and supporting his decision to end his life.

SXSW: The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution

Directed by Ondi Timoner, The New Americans: A Gaming Revolution is a high-paced and engrossing documentary about our new age of finance and digital disruption. This subject matter can be difficult to understand especially for the uninitiated who are unfamiliar with r/Wallstreetbets, cryptocurrency, memes and TikTok. Even the chronically online, like myself, need a bit of guidance to understand this complex online world and all the jargon that goes with it. Timoner uses facets of internet culture to visually tell her story while also pausing throughout the movie to define specific words and phrases that need to be clarified in order for the current conversation happening on screen to be fully understood. This helps the viewer not get lost in the technicalities and enriches the film by providing both visual entertaining with information.

‘The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution’ Review: A Heady Documentary Looks at How Stock Trading Turned Into a ‘Rebellious’ Addiction

In the history of casual comments that sound like they could mark the end of civilization, there’s a staggering contender in “The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution” — all the more so because it comes from an investor who sounds reasonably intelligent. The movie, the latest documentary provocation written and directed by Ondi Timoner (“Mapplethorpe,” “We Live in Public”), is about the new era of lone stock traders — many, though not all of them, millennials — who grew up playing video games and now experience investing at home as a literal extension of that thrill-a-minute world. The new trading apps, designed as visual candy, are meant to give you the rush that gamers get (and also the high that people seek out from slot machines). Trying to sum up the lizard-brain appeal of it all, an investor named Mitchell Hennessey explains, “Even if you lose on the trade, confetti pops up, and it almost feels like you’re leveling up. Even if you might have lost 50 percent.” So you’ve just lost half your money, but it still feels like you’re a winner. That’s called drinking the snake oil.

Review: ‘The New Americans: Gaming A Revolution’ is a meme-fueled tale of two mobs

‘The New Americans’ manages to expertly toe the line between cohesion and information overload, and it asks what it means to be an American—and what happens next. Cleverly, the story is told in the fast-paced internet language that drives it.

‘The New Americans: Gaming A Revolution’ Review: Ondi Timoner’s Provocative Doc Previews The World That Awaits Us – SXSW

After last year’s Last Flight Home, an emotionally intense but beautifully calibrated meditation on her father’s right to medically assisted death, Timoner returns to her forte, which is an uncanny ability to intuit the vicissitudes of pop culture while embedding herself in it while it’s happening. With awards season now a year away, it’s hard to say whether the immediate relevance of The New Americans will make it last the course, given what just happened with Laura Poitras’ once sure-fire winner in the space of six months. But the world that Timoner uncovers here is not going to be changing any time soon.

How we’ll cope with all this is still anybody’s guess. But what’s comforting about this sometimes overwhelming barrage of information is that, as she always has been, Timoner is ahead of you and is just as alert and open to the questions that her film raises as you are. Plus the music is great.

SXSW First Look: Director Ondi Timoner Digs Into GameStop Fiasco & The Internet’s Threat To Democracy In ‘The New Americans: Gaming A Revolution’ 

Oscar-shortlisted director Ondi Timoner was among the first documentary filmmakers to seriously examine the significance of the internet age, in her 2009 film We Live in Public.

The GameStop fiasco of 2021, in which day traders sent the stock market reeling by short-selling shares in the video game retailer, plays an integral role in the documentary.

“The New Americans takes us on a wild meme-driven ride to meet the founders of Reddit and WallStreetBets, crypto fanatics, bored housewives, and TikTok-ers turned millionaire traders, in order to investigate the never-before-made connection between the GameStop squeeze and the Jan 6th Insurrection,” according to a description of the film. “Disruptive tropes can help a disenfranchised generation to rise up against corrupt power structures. But will algorithms amplify our worst impulses, threatening the very pillars of our democracy? The New Americans is a mem-ified punk rock manifesto that takes us inside the ‘revolution game’ to look at where we came from and where we’re headed on the precipice of this new era.”

WallStreetBets Movie to Premiere at South by Southwest

WallStreetBets is heading to the big screen.

"The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution" will make its premiere next month at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

The 102-minute-long documentary film, directed by Ondi Timoner, lists WallStreetBets founder Jaime Rogozinski in its cast, as well as Jordan Belfort (the man whose financial crimes inspired Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street"), Anthony Scaramucci and ProTheDoge, the investor who made his name by going all-in on Dogecoin. Viewers will be in for a "wild meme-driven ride," the film's description says.

THE NEW AMERICANS: GAMING A REVOLUTION WORLD PREMIERE AT SXSW Film and TV Festival

Among the films in the festival’s documentary spotlight section are James Adolphus’ “Being Mary Tyler Moore,” an exploration of how the television icon revolutionized depictions of women, and Ondi Timoner’s “The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution,” which pulls together threads of finance, media and political extremism in contemporary culture.

Ondi Timoner Chronicles Her Father’s Quest for Dignified Death 

Ondi Timoner’s Sundance-debuting Last Flight Home is both a celebratory tribute to, and a shockingly intimate portrait of, a hardworking business and family man, whom adversity rendered a mensch. Indeed, the nonagenarian entrepreneur at the heart of this vérité doc — a Miami native who founded Air Florida, the fastest-growing airline in the world during the 1970s — was living an idyllic life until a neck cracking by a masseuse left the vibrant extrovert partially paralyzed at the age of 53. To compound the tragedy, this freak accident occurred before the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, thus allowing the upstart air carrier to legally force out the man responsible for building it.

ONDI TIMONER - “LAST FLIGHT HOME” & THE RIGHT TO DIE | THE DAILY SHOW

“It was terrifying, but also the most beautiful and sacred space any of us had ever been in.” Filmmaker Ondi Timoner discusses her documentary “Last Flight Home,” how California’s End of Life Option Act was a gift to her ailing father, Eli Timoner, and how his decision allowed their family to say goodbye and celebrate his life.

I HELPED MY FATHER END HIS OWN LIFE. HE HELPED ME BY LETTING ME FILM IT.

Last year, I made the most personal film of my career, about my father Eli’s death. In January 2021, aged 92, Dad was in hospital, bedbound, with no prospect of recovery. My mother was struggling to cope. The only option appeared to be going to a facility for his remaining months.

I’ve been a film-maker for 30 years and have always dreamed of telling my father’s story. I tend to make films about characters I describe as “impossible visionaries”: people with a singular vision who sometimes act impossibly to try and realise it – and to withstand the doubt and ridicule they incur.

Dad was my original impossible visionary: the most tenacious and innovative person I’ve ever known.

In New Doc 'Last Flight Home', a Film-Maker's Dad Gets His Final Call

Ondi Timoner's sweet, sad film about her father shows what a good death can look like.

You have to be in a certain mood to watch Ondi Timoner’s new documentary, Last Flight Home, which plots out the final 15 days of her 92-year-old father's life. Hmm, do you want to zone out to a Parks and Rec marathon tonight, or watch a family come to terms with their patriarch’s decision to instigate an assisted death and end his overwhelming physical exhaustion and pain? It might be a hard sell, but for those who can bear to think a little deeper about the nature of existence – and the end of existence – the rewards are rich.

WHY LAST FLIGHT HOME, ONDI TIMONER’S HEARTFELT DOCUMENTARY, IS A MOVING LESSON ON HOW TO SAY GOODBYE

“We don’t get a choice on how we come into this world, but we should get a choice on how we go out.”

These are the words of a nurse consulting Eli Timoner and his family, spoken as they progress towards his passing. 

Eli isn’t dying. Not in the medical sense. But he is tired of living. After suffering from a stroke in his early fifties and having spent the last few years in agony, unable to move and, in his own words “waiting to die”, Eli has chosen to start the process of terminating his life under the California End of Life Option Act.

Due to regulations under the act, once Eli has made his first official request to a physician, he must wait 15 days until he can be given the green light. 

It’s then that Ondi Timoner, his daughter, picks up a video camera and starts recording.

LAST FLIGHT HOME REVIEW– HEARTBREAKING PORTRAIT OF ASSISTED DYING

Ondi Timoner’s home-movie memoir is a heartbreaking and unexpectedly complex film about her elderly father in his final days. Eli Timoner was a swashbuckling entrepreneur who founded the budget airline Air Florida in the 1980s, became a stroke survivor in middle age, and finally, facing terrible ill-health, opted to end his own life under a Californian law that enforces a 15-day grace period in which the patient has time to reflect before the fatal drugs are administered. In fact they are self-administered: the applicant has to drink the hemlock-equivalent themselves, and there are wrenchingly tense scenes in which Mr Timoner tremblingly practises holding a cup in his hand. If he can’t, the whole thing is off.